Georgia puts health care facilities and data on Google Maps

Posted by Matt Jarrard, Health Planning Director, Georgia Department of Community Health

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Matt Jarrard, Deputy Director of the Healthcare Facility Regulation Division and Health Planning Director of Georgia’s Department of Community Health, which licenses and regulates health care facilities for the state. Tune into today’s webinar at 11:00am PST to hear more about how GaMap2Care is making a difference. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.


While the State of Georgia is known for its peaches and the Atlanta Braves, it also takes pride in finding ways to make life easier for its citizens. The Georgia Department of Community Health oversees programs that serve 10 million people and regulates 7,000 health care facilities, including nearly 2,000 personal care homes. In keeping with our goals of being lean and responsive, we found a cost-effective way to serve the community with GaMap2Care, an application built on Google Maps. The app helps the public and government officials locate, visualize and monitor all the state’s licensed health care facilities.

Using the app, people can locate facilities such as hospitals and personal care homes based on specialty, location, size and number of beds. They can also see satellite views or zoom in on street views. The app shows inspection reports for many facilities and other information which had previously required an open record request. Virtual tours let families quickly see if a facility meets their needs.

GaMap2Care is intuitive to use because of widespread familiarity with Google Maps. The app’s rich features allow us to help people in a variety of ways. For example, lawmakers have often asked for the number of nursing homes in their district. Staff would have needed to manually compare lists prepared in a separate report to district boundaries. Now, GaMap2Care provides this information all on one map that allows lawmakers to easily determine which district the facilities belong to.

GaMap2Care is also helping state workers and officials serve the community better. Analysts setting health care policy can now more easily identify underserved areas. In addition, the state’s 165 health care facility surveyors investigating complaints or non-compliance issues can calculate distances and plan trips before they hit the road, saving time and improving efficiency. We also added additional map layers, such as populations and weather, that let officials see what facilities might be affected before a natural disaster.

The app was designed and developed internally by existing staff. The ease of Google Maps’ customization enabled a programmer with no previous Geographic Information System (GIS) experience to integrate data from different sources into the map. Compared to other solutions, we found Google Maps to be easier to use, faster to load and offering more customization. A license from a traditional Geographic Information System would have required extensive user training and was expected to be considerably more than a Google Maps license.

With GaMap2Care, state workers can be productive and efficient, and citizens have access to information that saves them time and helps them make critical informed health care decisions. We look forward to making GaMap2Care even more useful with the launch of the mobile version of the application in the near future, and will continue to enhance and expand features and functionality.

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City of Omaha and Douglas County join forces to move government workers to Google Apps

Posted by Derek Kruse, CIO, Douglas Omaha Technology Commission, Nebraska

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Derek Kruse, CIO of the Douglas Omaha Technology Commission (DOTComm), which provides municipal technical services to the City of Omaha and Douglas County, Nebraska. Be sure to join Innovation for the Nation, a virtual summit featuring government customers, streaming live on July 31st and August 1st. And see what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Derek Kruse, CIO

The City of Omaha and Douglas County have something many municipalities lack, a collaborative relationship. With Omaha located within Douglas County, we are fortunate to live in a community that values working together to solve complex challenges. Our cooperation has led to many innovative solutions, including the formation of the Douglas Omaha Technology Commission (DOTComm). Another example of this collaborative spirit is our decision to upgrade our email and calendaring platform. In order to improve government productivity and efficiency, DOTComm has been tasked with moving approximately 5,000 city and county employees in more than 70 departments to Google Apps for Government.

In May, after a thorough and exhaustive evaluation process, the DOT.Comm Oversight Committee approved the proposal to implement Google Apps for Government. The decision was endorsed by the Mayor and also unanimously approved by both the City Council and the County Board of Commissioners. We decided to go with Google Apps because it not only meets our current needs, but it offers new collaboration features at a fraction of the cost it would take to upgrade our existing system. We chose SADA Systems, a Google Apps Premier Enterprise Reseller, to help with this transition and serve as our deployment partner. It is obvious that SADA’s focus on training and ensuring a smooth migration will enable us to quickly and easily adopt Google Apps.

Moving to Google Apps will provide tremendous benefits. Our current system is more than 10 years old and lacks any modern features. Employees struggle to access information on their mobile devices and people spend valuable time deleting emails because our mailboxes do not have enough space. Given the age of our system, we have seen a steep increase in outages as well. That will all change when we move to Google Apps for Government. We will offer a more secure, stable, modern and scalable cloud solution to the City and County. Employees will now be able to communicate instantly and work collaboratively online, even if they are miles apart. Mailbox size alone has people cheering -- one of our employees made the comparison that we will be moving from a shot glass to a swimming pool!

We started out this process to fix our aged email system. We have discovered this is much more than a fix -- this is the future -- and another big step in the ongoing collaboration between Omaha and Douglas County. The next few months will be very exciting as we implement Google Apps and we are very thrilled to be rolling up our sleeves once again to improve our community together.

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City of Monterey saves money and improves employee productivity with Google Apps

Posted by Angie Blake, City of Monterey, California

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Angie Blake, Information Solutions Manager for the City of Monterey, California. See what other organizations that use the Google Apps have to say.

The Information Services team for the City of Monterey is dedicated to providing the right resources and support for our workforce. We were using an aging and expensive Novell GroupWise email platform that held us back. We faced high overhead costs, a burdensome system administration, lack of innovation, no ability to collaborate and issues around integrating with other key data systems.

We spent a lot of time troubleshooting GroupWise problems: applying software updates to servers and clients, monitoring disk space usage, spam filter maintenance, troubleshooting server errors and connections to mobile devices and providing specialized user training. This time would have been better spent building our library of support resources for city employees.

After a thorough evaluation of multiple replacement options, our IT department recommended, and our City Council approved, the purchase Google Apps for Government and associated services from Google reseller SADA Systems.

With help from SADA Systems, we moved all 460 employees in just 90 days, finishing in early January 2013. SADA provided an excellent project plan, project manager and technical assistance. I truly believe that without SADA’s assistance, this transition would not have been as easy and successful.

Our chief reasons for Going Google were low cost, 24/7 availability and security, ability to collaborate, minimal user training needed, and access to our data across different types of applications and mobile devices. We also appreciated Google’s conversion tools, which allowed us to migrate all our existing e-mail, calendar, and contact information with ease and minimize disruption to employees.

Keep in mind: Monterey has dozens of offices located across the city and in the neighboring communities we support. It’s not just City Hall where our citizens go to get things done. We have public safety professionals, public works employees, employees with multiple types of mobile devices, fire stations, and service desks in different offices and nearby cities. The coordination and communication challenges in this distributed and decentralized environment were daunting, to say the least.

Today, city employees in these dispersed locations communicate using Gmail, share documents in Drive, use Google’s instant messaging, and Sites to stay coordinated. We’re also piloting Google+ Hangouts as another way to streamline collaboration and communication among the different offices. Just recently our five fire stations, located in three different cities, successfully held their staff meeting in a Google+ Hangout.

Switching to Google Apps will save the City 30 percent in IT costs over the next five years. The Information Services team can spend more time on implementing new technological solutions across the city. Even more important, this transition has empowered employees to do their jobs faster and with greater ease and efficiency, in turn, benefiting our citizens.

Join us for a webinar on Wed, Mar 6, 2013 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM PST to hear for yourself how Google Apps is making a difference in our city.

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